


Gravity

by PinkPenguinParade



Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Creation, Creation Myth, Crowley's Fall (Good Omens), How Do I Tag, Pre-Fall (Good Omens), Scene: Garden of Eden (Good Omens), This is what happens when my astronomy degree collides with my fic obsession, but better safe than sorry, falling, graphic depictions is probably a bit strong, y'all'll tell me if I need to add something here
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-15
Updated: 2020-07-15
Packaged: 2021-03-03 20:33:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,182
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24811621
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PinkPenguinParade/pseuds/PinkPenguinParade
Summary: And so when Lucifer and some of the others begin speaking of dissatisfaction, of things that they feel aren’t going properly, he doesn’t… agree, not precisely. When they complain of having their contributions either ignored or used in ways they hadn't planned, and all in pursuit of Mother's new projects, he doesn’tagree.But he listens, and heunderstands,when he comes home and hears those conversations. After all, it’s only talk.Right up until it isn't.
Relationships: Aziraphale/Crowley (Good Omens)
Comments: 16
Kudos: 41





	1. Before

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks as always to my lovely betas LastSaskatchewanPirate and LigeaStGermaine for talking me through the weird stuff that falls out of my head and being there when I drop random story fragments into text messages and then start asking if I'm crazy. My lovelies, I would not be nearly as sane as I am without your help.
> 
> Knock-on art is always welcome, but I do ask that you drop a note so I can see it. Fic is finished and frankly is only split into two parts because it's very much two separate parts, part two will be up in... however long it takes until I can't stand that part two isn't up, frankly. I don't expect it to be long. :)

He doesn't actually think that anyone else ever noticed. There's no reason anyone should have, of course. Most of the others are working on the more technical aspects and aren't actually out doing the creating. They come out in groups, for prototypes or engineering or interesting cases, but they're not out enough to see the pattern.

He, though, spends long stretches in the depths of space all alone, sculpting and molding. It is no great surprise that he is the only one who's noticed that after every stretch out sculpting the cosmos he sees more angels when he returns to Heaven. New faces, different classes and jobs and somehow, always, a little more familiar than they should have been for someone that he was meeting for the first time.

If pressed, which he never is, he will admit he began to play with it a little. A shift in the spectrum here, a bit of unusual atomic makeup there, the occasional flaring of the corona or blow off of stellar material which he would then see reflected in the minor variations between the forms of the new angels. And by the time he was sure, well, he _could_ have told everyone what was going on. But he also enjoyed having a secret, something that none of the other angels knew.

The Almighty must have known, of course--must have set it up carefully, in fact. He briefly considers being angry that his work is being used this way, without anyone asking or at least telling him. But he would create anyway and always feels so much joy when he comes home to see brand-new faces that are still so familiar, so he mostly doesn't think much of it.

And so when Lucifer and some of the others begin speaking of dissatisfaction, of things that they feel aren’t going properly, he doesn’t… agree, not precisely. When they complain of having their contributions either ignored or used in ways they hadn't planned, and all in pursuit of Mother's new projects, he doesn’t _agree._ But he listens, and he _understands,_ when he comes home and hears those conversations. After all, it’s only talk. 

Right up until it isn't.

He is, as usual, off alone in the emptiness of space. He always finds it relaxing to be out here, with just himself and star stuff in the middle of all creation. He’d moved out from the center of the galaxy into the spiral arms and is making small quirky stars--forming them in batches and then gently blowing them into the firmament, nudging each one until the gravitational forces balance out just right. 

Getting all the gravity right is important, the most important--get it a little wrong and the stars imbalance, get it wrong in the spaces between and they'll rip each other apart as they fall together. Even for these small, unassuming ones he builds in a little bit of himself so he can feel them, so he can track how they dance together. So he can tell when it’s off, when it would fail in a hundred years or a hundred million. They’re built to last for billions of years, after all, these stars. Tens of billions, some of them. And the tiny tickle when he gets it right never fails to make him happy.

This is how he comes to know--to be almost the first to know--when things go wrong. When the stars he cares for, that he had set spinning so sweetly, start to go out. Or, soon after, when they start to collapse in on themselves until even their light can’t escape.

The first star to go out was no one he knew particularly well--a cherub with streaks of green and yellow in her hair in just the shade of the Titanium spikes he’d put in her star’s spectrum.

The first he feels collapse, though; that was Samael. One of the first he had made and Lucifer’s right hand. The instant he feels it crumple he streaks to it and finds not the furnace he'd crafted but a fiery cloud around a spinning dark mass that pulls heavily at him. He leans in, trying to get a better look, but the gravity spikes and he knows he can't get near without falling in, being consumed. 

(He wonders if the same has happened to Lucifer's star--it hadn't been one of his. That old star, ancient and massive and bright, had been in place long before he’d gotten the job. But he had found it, out in the back beyond, once long ago when he'd been riding the gravities, letting the stars guide him in toward the massive galactic center.) 

_No,_ he thinks, and “No!” he screams into the void. It’s the first time in all his existence that ‘no’ is a complete thought. Before, no always meant, ‘not yet,’ or ‘that's not what we're doing,’ or even ‘I haven't heard the latest gossip, catch me up.’ He doesn’t know what to do with this feeling of complete negation, of being simultaneously emptied out and filled with fear. 

(He’s never known fear before, either; not truly. It eats at him now, cold and hollow, and he never knew he could feel things like this.)

More stars erupt and die, each taking a piece of him. More blow off their layers and collapse in on themselves until their light is lost, only the flame of their fall visible. He knows the names of too many of those dark chasms, has listened to them too many times.

They’ll be coming for him soon, he thinks. Part of him wants to fly back to Heaven, to meet the Host on his own terms, but… no. If this has happened to Lucifer’s circle, whatever _this_ looks like from Heaven, then his own collapse cannot be far behind. He could plead, he could beg, he could apologize… but his imagination fails him when he tries to believe that, of all the carnage that has been made of his stars, he would be the only one repentant.

Time is still so _new,_ to all of them--he’s not used to it yet. Can’t properly tell, out here on the fringes, the difference between minutes and millennia; only knows that in all the stars he built to live for billions of years he can feel the burnt out, collapsed husks of far too many of them.

He might, just might, have enough time for one last star. He hasn’t gotten approval, hasn’t heard back on the schematics he’d drawn up but that’s a formality, really. This one has been brewing in the back of his mind for a while, and he’s half-frantic with the need to _try,_ even if he can’t bring it off. He races through the arms of his galaxy to the spot he’d picked out, rides the troughs of the gravity he loves to speeds he can barely conceive. He dips by the dead and dying stars, the fallen ones, on the way, scooping elements and dust. Collecting pieces of those he’s lost. He has to try.

_Here._ Warm, it will be--not the hottest, to burn everything around it to ash. Not the coolest, lest it soldier on forever without being seen or appreciated. Big enough to shine, small enough to last and nurture. The star itself is easy, although he’s taking more time with this one, tweaking it, letting it pull together slowly….

He pushes it, just a little. Flattens it down, spreads it out so matter collects where he needs it. Pours in all the ash, all the heaviness that he carried all this way, and nudges the spinning disc into the shapes he needs. It’s close, fiddly work to get it set up just right, so that he can let gravity take over and finish the job. He doesn’t quite have the calm for it--the first four come together okay, and the big gas ones farther out, but the fifth planet fractures, spreading out and crumbling. He knows he can pull it together, if he could just focus, if he just had more time--

Too late. They’re coming, relentless. The Host has no experience with the wells that allowed him to slingshot his way here almost faster than thought, no appreciation for the beautiful curves and valleys of space. Their approach plucks the gravity in ways that grate and distract, and he loses control of the pieces of the fifth planet again.

Ah, well. He blows all the stability he can into his nascent system and trusts, _hopes_ it will be all right to continue building itself with no more nudges from him. 

And then he sets his posture straight and unthreatening, and faces the incoming Host.

“Lucifer has Fallen,” Michael tells him. 

“I know.” He doesn’t know what Falling is, doesn’t know quite what fate awaits him, but he saw what happened to their stars and cannot imagine a better word for that collapse of gravity.

“You were part of his group. You agreed with him.”

“We talked. Yes.” He could argue, he could plead and beg, but as much as he loves Michael he has never seen them bend, not in the face of righteousness. And his attention is pulled away from the Archangel anyway, to a small, worried, pale figure behind them, with a face and an aura he's never seen before. 

He didn’t think it would happen so quickly--he’s never gone home while his stars are still being built. But he hasn't spent this much attention on a single one in eons, either, and he can't deny, knows he's not mistaken.

The new angel has star-bright hair, almost the same yellow-white as the swirling plasma that still clings to his fingers. Eyes the green-blue of the early prototypes for surface water (he’d snuck in once to see where all the work was going and had been struck by the depths of color that simple hydrogen and oxygen could produce, even when it wasn’t on fire. Those shifting, everchanging shades had fascinated him. He’d spent some time building similar tones into his nebulae, but hadn’t ever gotten them quite the same). Even--he glances from the angel to the swirling chaos nearby--a brand-new, still-in-progress air.

“There was war,” Michael continues, and his attention snaps back to them. “Angels have died. A third of the Host has Fallen.”

_Died_ is not a term he’s familiar with, any more than he knows exactly what his experience of ‘Falling’ will be. It doesn’t matter, he thinks, because he’s seen the stars. He can feel the holes in himself where they used to be; he can feel how their absence still warps the gravity. “I know,” he says again.

Mercifully--although if they knew it was merciful they probably wouldn’t do it--nobody asks him _how_ he knows. Which means he doesn’t have to try to explain about the stars, which feels like a worse betrayal of the Almighty than any he has already committed. 

Nobody asks him how he knows, which means he doesn’t have to learn what a lie is. Not yet.

Michael steps forward, closer to him. “You were part of his group,” they say quietly.

“Not much,” he says, honestly. “He had some things to say. Sometimes we had fun.”

“Angels are mourning their brethren. There is rage in Heaven.”

He knows it won't do any good, but some part of him can’t help it. “I could stay out here, get on with my work. Stay out of Heaven. Wouldn’t even see the planning teams longer than to get out of the way.” It would be lonely, but he could do it--continue on, building the universe. He would be able to feel them coming in the gravity and make sure nobody ever saw anything more of him than the sparks of his hair until She came Herself and told him to stop.

Michael is practically vibrating, pent-up energy from the war and the fights leaking through, but when they speak they mostly just sound weary. “You know that won’t work.”

He sighs. It wouldn’t work, he knows; he can see too much rage in the Host before him. There are so, so many, and they’re all so angry. All except the new one, who just twists slightly in on himself, watching avidly, looking concerned. 

He gestures at the small figure watching them. “There’s a new one?”

Michael nods, allowing the change of subject for a moment. “She says he’s to be a protector. Nobody’s quite sure what he’s protecting, yet, though.” They sigh, much like he had a moment ago. “I think… She didn’t say, but I think he’s going to be the last. She’s pulled Herself away from us, for now.”

“Because we fought? Because her children rejected her?”

Michael nods. 

He feels in himself for where She resides, and finds Her presence muted. Distant. He’d been too distracted with the stars falling to connect that as well, but now he’s looked at it he knows that part of the pain he feels is that absence. “...And so everyone is, is _mourning_ twice over,” he says, the new word feeling odd in his mouth.

They nod again. “I know you didn’t fight, brother. I know you weren’t even there. But everyone lost someone, today, and everyone knows you were Lucifer’s friend.” They take a deep breath. “Either you share his fate, or you will become the focus of another rebellion, and I _cannot_ live through this again.” Their voice breaks and he flares, automatically wanting to protect them, and cracks run straight through him, too.

He’s never found his star, only knows there has to be one. If Lucifer, eldest and brightest had one, then there must be one that holds his own heart, right?

He hopes, when he strips off his outer layers and collapses, that it will at least be pretty.

***


	2. The Beginning

He has known gravity his whole existence. He has danced with it, traveled the stars using controlled falls that bring him farther, faster than he ever could have moved under his own power.

He never, ever before knew that falling could _hurt_ so much.

The layers of him flare off, endlessly ablating in the face of this Fall. He imagines--when he can think at all--that all he is is streaming out behind him, burning bright in the void to mark his passing. That in thousands of years, his flames will still be visible, to someone standing far enough away.

Mostly, though, he screams.

His throat burns in the fire he can't quite leave behind him. He can't feel Her at all anymore. The place in him where She used to live is empty, a sucking vacuum that pulls him in, inescapable. He isn't strong enough to hold it open. (He isn't strong enough to hope that She might one day want him back.)

He can feel the gravity around him, in all directions, and he reaches for it but can’t catch hold. There is only one direction he can move in, and he can't slow down.

Heaven help him (no, not Heaven, not anymore. Not ever again), he thought it would be _better_ when he stopped.

A crushing impact, and burning _burning._ He recognizes sulfur--he'd used so much of it, in pinches and in tonnes--and he automatically reaches out to move it, control it. Once, back when he made it dance in his stars, he could have peeled it away with a thought.

He tries, and sobs. Too much of him is gone. He's too small now, too broken, that sunken void within him throbbing and aching around an emptiness he's never come close to before.

So he learns anew. This is not the form he's used to; he pulls himself up anyway. Picks a direction blindly and gropes towards it, wanting only for it all to stop.

Someone else is there--he strikes out and finds a thrashing, screaming body. He's still enough who he was to grab it and drag it with him even though he can barely see, might be making it worse but--

Solidity, under him, crawling out of the fire and blinking furiously, fighting for breath. “Thank Hea--” he mutters, breaking off when his throat seizes, choking him on a word he can no longer say. His entire body spasms around it, expelling it along with what feels like half the sulfur he waded through, as though his body would turn itself inside out rather than let him call upon his former home.

He hits his knees first, then once his body is done fighting itself he falls again exhausted to… to wherever this is, now. Wherever he’s found himself. It’s blackened and stifling but next to the sulfur pits it’s--

Better. Not... any place he knew before (he won’t even let himself think it this time). But better. 

He used to be bigger, he thinks. He used to be more. Used to be… not trapped, in this aching, tiny, fragile form. He used to be… used to be...

It slips through his fingers as he tries to clutch tighter. He can feel it, even the knowledge of what he used to be rushing away the more he tries to hold it. He remembers stars, though. He remembers… expecting this, but not wanting it. Not knowing what he was expecting.

He remembers that he should have been full of Light, not crushed into this cold emptiness.

He remembers that he knew Her, and She turned away from him. He doesn’t have to hold on to that, it’s seared into him--he will always know that his birthright was Light, and that he lost it.

He will always know this, and now he knows what grief is. He curls in on himself, and learns how to weep.

***

He doesn’t know his new brothers, not really. They don’t know him. All of them changed by the Fall, all of them grieving and agonized and angry. Between the changes in them, and his own memories shifting beneath his feet, he knows very few of them.

Lucifer he knows, of course. Lucifer makes sure everyone knows him, makes sure everyone fears him. Lucifer had him--has had every new demon who crawled out of the sulfur, who didn’t get lost in there to give up and perish--dragged before him. Lucifer gives them each a new name, a task, a place. He’s a latecomer to this; one of the last to Fall. There aren’t many jobs left and while he could fight for them, he has no desire to establish himself as a power in this new place. He fights just enough to protect himself, to be left alone. (He still spends so much time fighting.)

When news starts running through Hell that the big project is off the ground--new creations, under a new star, all the things they almost remember--Lucifer calls for someone to go put a spike in the Divine plan. And he volunteers, in a nonchalant, carefully lazy way. _Doing them a favor really, not worth staying here to spend more time sparring with the guys...._

And it _works._ He never dreamed it would work, but it does, and he leaves behind the eternal backstabbing and jockeying for power to find himself on a rock out in space, full of growing things.

***

It’s oddly, tantalizingly familiar, this place--the sun above, the plants, the water (shifting, shifting, how many colors can water be, all at once?). The feel of gravity, under him, around him. 

His body has changed again, different here--when he arrives from Hell he is long, cool. He can’t move the way he used to and everything smells different, more vivid (everything smells _wonderful,_ his tongue flicks out and the world explodes into taste and smell and so much information it overwhelms him, makes this body stutter and slip sideways). The sun above is perfect, warm on his back and the earth cool under his belly and there’s no hint anywhere of burning--

No, wait. His tongue flicks out again, and he twists sideways in surprise and sudden fear, stumbling himself into a form of reasonable locomotion. Over there, he can smell burning, can taste a fire that reminds him of the ache in his heart. It draws him and makes him want to run from it, all at once.

He shies off into the green to get closer, to hide, to see without being seen.

 _There._ On the wall, pacing. Facing outward, turning inward, an… an _angel,_ he thinks carefully, wondering if this word, too, is taken from him, but he feels no extra distress. An angel, then, sunny-haired, standing in the light, with a flaming blade he’s not paying terribly much attention to and…

Are those _flowers_ in his hair?

He creeps forward, starting to get the hang of this new shape, rippling his belly across the damp soil. Flowers. In the hair of an angel. (An oddly familiar angel, shining in the light of an oddly familiar sun, on an oddly familiar rock…)

He inches closer still, and the sword flares. The angel looks down at it, frowns a worried frown, and resumes vigil looking out on the sands.

He slithers away, the earth skating under his scales.

***

There are other creatures here.

He shouldn’t be surprised; he remembers, vaguely, talk of a great plan, of new creatures. But it’s hazy, half-familiar, and he doesn’t quite think of it before he encounters them.

He does wish Hell had warned him, though, as he nurses his crushed tail. Note, he thinks. Do not surprise the new creatures.

There are quite a lot of new creatures, in fact, but the _humans_ are the most fascinating. They called him a _snake_ and he’s met others that look like him, but they don’t think like he does. The few conversations he's had with them mostly involved the best rocks for sunning (although the snakes he met were not wrong about that. Those are excellent rocks).

It’s just… well, he’s supposed to be making trouble, not sunning himself, and it’s going to be very hard to do if he has only this body to wear. 

He watches for days, getting a feel for them. The woman goes sometimes to look at the large tree in the middle of the Garden, staring at the fruit until the angel from the wall interrupts her. Then they talk for a bit, and laugh; the angel guides her subtly away (or sometimes not-so-subtly). The man joins them, and they try some other fruit, or care for the other creatures, or merely chat. Sometimes, yes, the woman weaves together flowers for the angel’s hair.

The angel on the wall wears a body like the humans, he thinks. His own body has changed so many times now, maybe he can make it change, direct it--

He cracks his head on a low branch. On one hand, it worked! He has hands now! On the other one, he thinks, ow. He rubs at the top of his head.

His hair falls down, over his face, and his breath stops. That color…. _Sulfur,_ he thinks, unbidden, and flinches. He can’t remember what color it used to be, what it’s supposed to be--there’s almost no light in Hell anyway, and certainly no reflections--but this, this is straight from the emission spectrum of sulfur. (He thinks, without meaning to, of what else might have burned away in that pit, and what might have replaced it).

He practices, for a bit, until he can change smoothly; he plays with this body until he can speak no matter what his form. They aren’t afraid of him as a snake. He can get close, as a snake.

***

God is angry--God is _angry,_ how could he have forgotten what that sounds like, what that feels like? He writhes under the low plants, glad only She’s not talking to _him_ , then gives that up and dives into the soil, down and down.

The sound of Her wrath follows him, echoing in the molecules of the earth.

***

The angel on the wall is worried again--sunny hair standing up in curls, hands twisting around one another. Worried, and… sad? It’s only an echo of the grief he still carries, but it plucks him, and he resonates.

He slithers closer, nervous but charmed, towards this angel that is unlike all the angels he remembers and still frustratingly, _maddeningly_ familiar. He is drawn here, pulled.

His tongue flicks out, automatically, scenting the air for that blade.

Nothing. Green things and soil and the other animals of the Garden; crushed flowers and the sunshine-scent of the angel. No holy fire. And the angel doesn’t seem in a smiting mood, so he slithers forward, slipping into his more human shape (sulfur, he thinks, catching a glimpse of his hair, and shoves that thought down again). 

“Well, THAT went down like a lead balloon,” he says. He turns to the angel....

And he falls.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, uh... that happened, I guess. not sure exactly where it came from, but I am sure that I did not expect to be dusting off an astronomy degree and doing recreational remedial stellar spectroscopy for a 4k ficlet. (also, I realized that there is no measure of time or distance available to me that does not have its basis in life on the Earth. None. Even galactic rotations are generally figured based on the rotation rate at Sol, because galaxies don't rotate as discs. So I'm running with years and the like because otherwise I'm just making crud up, basically, and who has time for that?)
> 
> Hope y'all enjoyed it--as always, thanks for the read, and y'all stay safe and well out there, okay?

**Author's Note:**

> thanks, y'all. Kudos are loved, and comments are treasured (even though I may not always reply to all of them, they are every one read and cherished and smiled over and hugged to my withered heart).


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